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Content May Be King, But Audio Is Qween In Former Mediacom Chief's New Venture

Doug
Checkeris has always had his quirks. Now he has his Qwyrk. The quirky part comes from the fact that he's a Canadian media buyer who rose to be head of North America for one of WPP's leading media
agency networks, Mediacom. The Qwyrky part comes from the fact that that's the name of the new venture he's been incubating since leaving WPP.

When I left MediaCom a couple of years ago I
spent, time meeting with all kinds of people and companies in the investment and marketing services business,” he explains, adding, “I continue to be amazed by the ability of the agency
business to fend off the application of disruptive technologies.”

That said, he believes some momentous change is coming, so he spent most of his hiatus angling around “ventures
that are disruptive in nature, which suits my personality, and feature content and technology.”

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The result is Qwyrk, a new app that officially launched Thursday that enables people to
personalize email and social media messages with music, movie quotes and sound effects. Specifically, it’s an audio app that allows social media users to add up to 24-seconds of sounds,
including songs, mobile soundtracks or audio effects to an email, Facebook post or Twitter tweet.

At launch, Qwyrk had already licensed “millions” of audio tracks from record
labels, film studios and sound effect libraries. . In other words, Checkeris and his partners want to make Qwyrk the Instagram of sound.

As for the “monetization” model,
well, given Checkeris’ background you might not be surprised to learn that it’s a 100% ad-supported one. And it’s a pretty ingenious one at that. While the app must be downloaded and
installed for the person sending a Qwyrk, anyone can receive it - and the advertising embedded along with it.

There's even a commerce model, because Qwyrk effectively is a sampling opportunity
for music labels, with a feature that enables full-length tracks to be purchased via online retailers.

"People have a basic need to be understood and Qwyrk offers a way to satisfy that need
beyond emoticons and 'LOL's," says Checkeris.